The Tsunami of Crap and a Lack of Readers

This is a summary of a guest post I wrote for the blog of my dear friend Rivka Kawano (after whom a beloved Pearseus character is named). Rivka is a great friend of Indies, offering some great training and marketing advice. You can read the full post on her blog, Author Sensei.

Should I Publish Traditionally or Go Indie?

As you know, I’m a hybrid author. A short story and a book of mine have been traditionally published, but I have also self-published six books. So, I’m quite familiar with both means of publication, and have had plenty of positive experiences with them. Which is probably why it distresses me when people attack Indies.

Help! I’m Drowning

Opponents of self-publishing usually levy two charges against it: that there is no quality control, and that Indies will swamp the market.

The first argument, commonly referred to as the tsunami of crap, complains about the bad-quality books that Indie authors have, supposedly, unleashed upon unsuspecting readers. However, I have yet to come across a truly dreadful Indie book. So far, my experience has followed a traditional Bell curve – i.e. some books have not been to my liking, some I have loved, and many were in between.

Anyone Seen any Good Readers Lately?

The second charge against self-publishing is that, with everyone becoming a writer, we will run out of readers. This reminds me of a common fear a few years back, when I kept reading articles on how the Internet was bursting at the seams and we would soon run out of bandwidth, domain names, servers… You name it.

What these articles failed to take into account is that, any system growing rapidly, will also have more resources at its disposal. The millions of people joining the Internet fed its expansion. As a result, we now have ever increasing capacity and millions of unused names.

The same applies to books. For example, ever since I published my first book, I have been reading at an exponential rate. I can only hope that everyone becomes a writer, as this creates a whole new generation of readers!

As for the quality charge, why don’t you read my children’s book, Runaway Smile, online for free and make up your own mind?

I love this post! I have become a voracious reader since I began writing. There is so much fascinating stuff out there, so many ideas and characters and thoughts and plots – and all so much more brilliant than my own. Reading is like a writing lesson for me.

Writers can’t write well unless they read widely. We first learn to write by reading, and reading a lot. So I agree with you Nicholas, that there should now be a glut of readers. What we don’t have though are writers who are comfortable with reading widely and well outside their chosen genre. We need readers who are willing to experiment and try something new, allowing authors to stretch their wings and experiment further with slinging words together, and using their imaginations to find and develop the stories they tell and the characters they create, and become innovative with the formats in which we write. We do need new readers, though, all the time. I’m working on an idea soon that I’ll be unveiling shortly in an effort to turn that tsunami into one of readers.

I, too, have been reading voraciously since I started writing. Last year, I read over 80 books when it couldn’t have been more than twenty the previous years. Also, indie authors come with promo needs hence the emergence of hordes of book bloggers who, in terms of reading, can win any challenge! I feel that nowadays more readers are around than ever before!

I have run into some bad self-published books, but they aren’t the norm. These are typically done by people who were looking to make a quick buck. You don’t see many of those that often, so I think they were a product of the system being a ‘Hot New Trend’. That or people are seeing that they tend to come with a really bad book blurb.

For some reason, ‘more writers means less readers’ sounds like reverse logic to me. I would think having more of something means drawing an audience. A wider variety of stories means you appeal to more people. The only thing that I think can cause a reduction in readers is when everything looks the same. Having hundreds of Hunger Games ripoffs can turn people off to the indie world because of their exposure. Kind of like going to a restaurant. If you show up on a day where several staff members are out with the flu, a new cook is in the back, and the bathroom got destroyed by an early customer then you’ll have a bad experience and never return. It doesn’t matter if that was a rare day of disaster for the place. (Think I stopped making sense.)

Never heard that one, that we’ll run out of readers. That’s ludicrous! More and more teachers, at least in New Hampshire, have implemented book clubs where they break the class into groups and have them read one book a month, chosen from a list on ten the teacher approved. Each week the group discusses the chapters they’ve read and then collectively write a book report and post a review online. The kids love it! And I think it’s a great way to keep the reader pool plentiful. This is public school, too. So, no, we won’t ever run out of readers. As far as the other comment, sadly I have heard that one. It’s not fair. It’s not right. But some readers see a self-published book differently than a traditionally published one. Of course, these are usually the same folks who call genre fiction garbage, too. Met a few recently, as a matter of fact, which I thought was a rude comment considering I write genre fiction. Book snobs!

You must have better reading karma than I, Nicholas: I have read a lot of “crap” books, but not all were indie published! That’s the irony: traditional publishers put out their share of crap, but no reviewers condemn the entire trad publishing industry for it, do they?

There will always be poor writers and even worse editors (or no editing); the difference in the last 10 years is that many of their “books” and “short stories,” etc., find their way into print and ebook formats. Then, piling injury upon injury (for readers, that is) SOME readers/”reviewers” provide false or ignorant (or worse, “honest” but misguided) high-ranking “reviews” for awful books.

These misleading rankings and comments (and the lack of negative/accurate reviews and comments) perpetuate the misery heaped upon unwary readers who purchase/download a book only to find that the reviews were lies and the books are crap. THIS is the way indie pub gets a bad rep, I think. If more readers/reviewers would provide the negative reviews some books deserve, we’d all be better off.

So it goes.

Best to you all!

Sally (who has received and posted my share of negative reviews, proudly!)

I don’t think we will run out of readers since books are still a great value. I do worry about less-than-polished books scaring readers away, but…I also think the indie community is starting to police itself a bit more. I sense a push from withing for writers to engage with alpha and beta readers, editors, and proofreaders.

A. I don’t believe we will ever run out of readers.
B. Most Indie books are excellent. I’ve come across one that simply was poor writing with no plot and no characters to speak of. It just contained a litany of disconnected thoughts.
C. Indie debut books sometimes need more editing and proofreading, especially if the author published without outside help. I think it would behoove an author to seek some help to make sure the book is polished before putting it out for the public.
D. I just finished an amazing debut book by an Indie author.

I have started to read (and abandoned) plenty of badly written indie books, some of them having a plot that was out of an LSD trip even. And even though I may agree with the fact that it’s treacherous ground to buy an indie book when you haven’t sampled the author’s writing skills even in a blog post, I would never buy into the mentality of ‘running out of’ anything. This is limited thinking and fear is at the heart of it. Yuk. The truth is that every granny out there is buying a kindle as we speak, plus most of the people I personally know love to chat but can’t string a sentence together on paper. So to say that everyone is becoming a writer, is not only ridiculous but also carries the wrong thinking that writing is just a hobby, that anyone can take on, like fishing. Of course, anyone who’s ever written anything longer than a shopping list knows that this is not true.